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- Title
Minding the gap: in-flight body awareness in birds.
- Authors
Schiffner, Ingo; Vo, Hong D.; Bhagavatula, Partha S.; Srinivasan, Mandyam V.
- Abstract
Introduction When birds fly in cluttered environments, they must tailor their flight to the gaps that they traverse. We trained budgerigars, Melopsittacus undulatus, to fly through a vertically oriented gap of variable width, to investigate their ability to perform evasive manoeuvres during passage. Results When the gap was wider than their wingspan, the birds passed through it without interrupting their flight. When traversing narrower gaps, however, the birds interrupted their normal flight by raising their wings or tucking them against the body, to prevent contact with the flanking panels. Our results suggest that the birds are capable of estimating the width of the gap in relation to their wingspan with high precision: a mere 6% reduction in gap width causes a complete transition from normal flight to interrupted flight. Furthermore, birds with shorter wingspans display this transition at narrower gap widths. Conclusion We conclude from our experiments that the birds are highly aware of their individual body size and use precise, anticipatory, visually based judgements to control their flight in complex environments.
- Subjects
AWARENESS; BIRDS; BUDGERIGAR; WINGS (Anatomy); EXPECTATION (Philosophy)
- Publication
Frontiers in Zoology, 2014, Vol 11, Issue 1, p1
- ISSN
1742-9994
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1186/s12983-014-0064-y